But one thing that did crane my neck while zipping around the city was the sight of a London cab in Beijing taxi colors. So I finally tracked down one of the 30 new London cabs driving the streets of the Olympic city. Made under an agreement between Geely (China) and London Taxis International, the TX4 was brought in as a nod to the international tourists and the Paralympic Games that follow in September. I was lucky enough to find one queueing up, and the driver interested in gabbing.

He said they are indeed limited, to around 30 in the city, and they will continue to stay in service even after all the Olympics are over. They are wheelchair capable, and are left-hand drive, unlike their British-bound counterparts.

The 66-year-old Mr. Hu’s appearance before foreign reporters Friday was a rare move into the public spotlight for a leader who has long shunned it. Mr. Hu has never given a news conference in China or abroad.

From the BBC:

Hosting the Games showed China’s desire for peaceful global ties, he said.

His comments came amid apparent concessions by Beijing in a row over internet access for journalists.

More sites which had been blocked in Olympic media centres - such as that of rights group Amnesty International - were accessible on Friday, journalists said.

Here’s a rather representative list of sites that are now available in China, which include newspaper, magazine and NGO web sites previously hard blocked. This is taken from some that were sent on a recent Great Firewall list, and some I’ve added.

• 西方媒体：(Western media)
• 路透社 http://cn.reuters.com/
• 维基百科 http://zh.wikipedia.org/
• 自由亚洲电台 http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/
• 美国之音 http://www.voanews.com/chinese/
• 华尔街日报 http://chinese.wsj.com/gb/index.asp
• 金融时报中文 http://www.ftchinese.com/sc/index.jsp
• 香港媒体：(Hong Kong media)
• 明报新闻网 http://www.mingpaonews.com/
• 明报月刊 http://www.mingpaomonthly.com/cfm/main.cfm
• 亚洲时报 http://www.atchinese.com/
• 亚洲周刊 http://www.yzzk.com/cfm/main.cfm
• 南华早报 http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/
• 南华早报中文 http://olympics.scmp.com/GCO_Simpchi_Index.aspx
• 苹果日报 http://www1.appledaily.atnext.com/template/apple/sec_main.cfm?
• 台湾媒体：(Taiwan media)
• 联合新闻网 http://udn.com/NEWS/main.html
• 中国时报 http://news.chinatimes.com/mainpage.htm
• 自由时报 http://www.libertytimes.com.tw/index
• NGOs
• Human Rights Watch http://www.hrw.org
• Reporters Sans Frontiers http://www.rsf.org (Chinese site unblocked only in Olympics media center)
• Amnesty International http://www.amnesty.org

This is actually quite remarkable for folks living in China. The “Big Three” NGOs that have been unrelenting critics of China have been reliably blocked for years. YZZK (Yazhou Zhoukan) and Apple Daily both in Hong Kong, have done some of the most critical journalism regarding China.
RSF, acknowledging the good news, doesn’t take much time to celebrate and continues to push hard.

“This partial lifting of censorship shows that the Chinese government is not completely insensitive to pressure. If the entire world had been pressuring China since 2001, even before these games were assigned to Beijing, the situation might have been different today. And perhaps imprisoned journalists would have been freed before the opening ceremony.

Let’s be clear though: these unblocked sites are still subject to the sophisticated keyword blocking system of the GFW, which looks at both URLs and the body of web sites. The sites above are no longer blocked, as a rule, but the content on the site might still trigger a block. On the plus side, it seems the keyword filtering of the GFW seems to be less sensitive than normal, but the big taboo subjects are still blocked quickly.

NBC Nightly News did a piece on the blocking yesterday (July 31). I was amused when Danwei’s Jeremy Goldkorn was on camera demonstrating how to use a virtual private network and noted that living with the net nanny wasn’t that big a deal.

Goldkorn: “I don’t see that it’s really going to impede anybody’s work.”
NBC: “Do you think the foreign media is just whining a little bit?”
Goldkorn: “Yeah. Absolutely they’re whining.”

I suppose one could make the argument that leaving the restricted GFW “harmonized” Internet as-is would have given foreign journalists a real taste of what China’s Internet users deal with every day. Now, they get a freed-up, “special” Internet to do their job and this issue goes away for the next three weeks. The question is, after the party’s over, will any of the sites above stay unblocked.

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/chinese/
• http://zh.wikipedia.org
• http://www.rfa.org (Radio Free Asia)
• http://www.atnext.com (Apple Daily HK, newspaper critical of Beijing)

These were all considered pretty firmly blocked for a long time, so it’s a pleasant surprise. Perhaps the cry of reporters in the Beijing Olympic Media Center finally made it through to the organizers that they should follow through on their promise.

Public relations-wise, putting a censored Internet in the press center simply seemed like a terribly dumb move. Yes, before the Olympics even start, why don’t you completely poke and upset the press corp and give them plenty of material for harping on human rights and censorship in China. Maybe they thought the journalists would be too busy writing about the bad pollution problems instead.

So for now, kudos to the authorities for opening up these sites, even though every indication is that the authorities will revert to pre-Olympic policies around October 17. John Kennedy suggested a betting pool as to when the sites will be reblocked. My bet: 8 hours and 8 minutes after the Olympic closing ceremony.

Let’s not forget though there are plenty of sites still blocked in China, including Tor Project, Amnesty International, Wikia, The Pirate Bay, AboutUs.org, and LiveJournal, for which Twitterer wangzhongxia could not help observing:

I don’t kno why Livejournal is a bigger threat to China than things like RFA mandarin edition

Sometimes you need a sense of humor to deal with the net nanny. 

But the seduction of this technique poses some serious problems.

This has been the case with Google’s new offering called Knol, the so-called “Wikipedia rival,” which is meant to “highlight authors” creating user-generated content.

The recent general reporting around Google Knol has been rather atrocious. For the lack of any better metaphors, most journalists (including professional “tech journalists”) saw the “user created” part of Knol and lacking any significant understanding about either project, immediately labeled it a “Wikipedia rival.” A quick Yahoo News and Google News search sees an overwhelming number of headlines trumpeting Knol as this Wikipedia “rival” or Google’s “answer” to the free encyclopedia.

But besides simplistically sharing a “user generated” Web 2.0 pedigree, the comparison is flawed in so many ways.

The head-to-head matchup seems obvious because Wikipedia is the only thing that immediately comes to mind to most writers when thinking “user generated.” I contend it’s lazy journalism, where respected tech outlets also fell for this trap. It seems it was too tempting to stick by the story, portraying nonprofit David competing against corporate search king Goliath.

The result, is we’re stuck with this fallacious “media narrative.” And from now on, Knol will always be seen as Wikipedia’s foil. Even when it’s not.

Have you heard of Associated Content, Squidoo, Helium or WikiHow? No? If you haven’t, you shouldn’t be writing about Google Knol. These are exactly the working models that Google Knol is up against, not Wikipedia’s.

To see exactly why Wikipedia is such a bad comparison, consider the main aspects of Google Knol [1] [2]:

• Goal: “first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read”
• Articles are controlled by a single author, who has to use a real name.
• Collaboration: at the discretion of the lead author aka “moderated collaboration”
• Opinions are allowed and encouraged in articles, and there can be competing articles about the same subject.
• Knol may include ads at the discretion of the author, and profits shared
• Licensing of content is varied: can be CC-BY, CC-BY noncommercial, or traditional copyright
• “Google will not serve as an editor in any way”
• “So what subjects can I write on? (Almost) anything you like. You pick the subject and write it the way you see fit.”

As a result, most of the content that has emerged so far resemble the “practical” content sites as listed above:
how-to guides, health and medical advice, consumer/buyers guides, business/career pointers. These are exactly the things Wikipedia has insisted it does not want to be.

Don’t take my word for it, see the guidelines at [[What_Wikipedia_is_not]]

• Wikipedia is not a manual, guidebook, or textbook…
• A Wikipedia article should not read like a how-to style manual of instructions, advice (legal, medical, or otherwise) or suggestions, or contain how-tos. This includes tutorials, walk-throughs, instruction manuals, game guides, and recipes.[4] If you are interested in a how-to style manual, you may want to look at wikiHow or our sister project Wikibooks.

The guidelines of Wikipedia also prohibit: personal essays, advocacy, opinion pieces on current affairs or politics, scandal mongering or gossip columns and self promotion.

Although Knol has been touted as a more responsible, moderated Wikipedia the above policies actually makes Knol much more liberal and uncontrolled than Wikipedia, which has many guidelines about what constitutes an article, what is acceptable content, and how to abide by its neutral point of view policy.

By throttling collaboration through a single lead author, you lose what has been Wikipedia’s hallmaark — the “piranha effect” of people building off each others’ work and evolving content beyond a single author’s knowledge.

Let’s put these criteria up side by side again:

Let me pull out my journalism professor’s ruler and whap all the tech journalists on the wrist who have used this comparison. Let’s please stop pitting these two against each other.
From my feed of Yahoo News reporting on Wikipedia and Knol, here are my three tier ratings of how folks did on this story. I will not even bother hyperlinking to the stories I considered faulty analysis.
Poor

• Google launches Wikipedia rival Knol (ZDNet UK)
• Google Launches Its Challenge To Wikipedia With Wide Release Of Knol (paidContent.org via Yahoo! Finance)
• Google’s Wikipedia rival, Knol, goes public (CNET)
• Google Launches Its Challenge To Wikipedia With Wide Release Of Knol (CBS News)
• Google launches Wikipedia rival (IT World)
• Knol: Google Takes on Wikipedia (ReadWriteWeb)
• Knol, Google’s Version of Wikipedia, Goes Public (PC Magazine)
• Knol: (n.) Google’s version of Wikipedia (BetaNews)
• Google infiltrates the knowledge sharing game (SiliconIndia)
• Google unveils Wikipedia-like tool (Australian IT)

Average

• Google’s Knol Launches: Like Wikipedia, With Moderation (Search Engine Land)
• Wikipedia, Meet Knol (New York Times)
• Google Launches Knol, The Monetizable Wikipedia (TechCrunch)
• Google Makes Knol Publically Available (EContent Magazine)

Good

• Google Knol Launches; More Like Squidoo than Wikipedia (Mashable)
• Google Decides to Make its Knol Site a Moderated Wikipedia (Search Engine Journal)
• Knol is no Wiki (techkeyla.com)

And for those still debating the quality of “blogging vs journalism” issue, consider all the best sources for reporting on the Knol launch are, yes, blogs.

“Working for the Olympics as an IT contractor, I recently moved to the Media Village (where all of the reporters live) and was surprised the there was no free internet. BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee of the 2008 Olympic Games) is charging a ridiculous amount of money for ADSL service: for

• 512/512 it costs 7712.5 RMB (1,131.20 USD);
• 1M/512 it costs 9156.25 (1,342.95 USD);
• 2M/512 it costs a whopping 11,700 RMB (1,716.05 USD).

That is for only one month! For extra features like a fixed IP? That costs an additional 450 RMB (66 USD). I just can’t believe that not only do I have to deal with the Great Firewall of China, but also pay through the nose to use it!”

While I can imagine that it is “noise” for NBC and the big guys, it is not inconsequential for other news outfits.

I suggest someone be kind and bring an Airport Express or other Wifi router and share the Internet love.

My problem perhaps was thinking there was a reasonable way of getting from Cairo airport directly to Alexandria by some means of conveyance. The Cairo airport isn’t very welcoming from the outset. Note to CAI airport: cramming both departing and arriving passengersthrough one small doorway is not a smart idea.

After exiting the airport immigration/baggage area, I’m hounded by scores of limo and taxi drivers trying to scam visitors into a hotel or a cab ride. I try to lose these hangers on and head right to the Information counter. The one guy with a computer screen of flight info knew nothing about buses and trains to Alexandria, and it seemed like he barely understood my English question. After seeing my failure to get anything useful from INFORMATION the limo drivers slapped the “clueless fresh meat” label on my forehead, and again swirled around me giving dubious information and trying to ply their wares. Even when I said no, they trailed along like Pikmin asking to “help.” I’ve travelled to too many sketchy places in Asia to fall for that trap.

I do a lap around the airport terminal and there is no tourist information booth or other helpers, only paid services counters who I never trust for general info.

I finally found a security guard who points to a location in the distance saying buses to Alexandria are out there. Walk across the sky bridge to an adjacent modern mall, drag luggage up steps, down steps, through sand, under a railing and across broken pavement. Along the way two drivers insist they can drive me to Alexandria for 400 LE. After tailing me for a while, they realize they’re not going to get me. They turn tail and give up.

I stumble around the parking lot asking a few folks about the mythical bus to Alexandria, who keep pointing out on the horizon. Maybe they were saying, “Walk to Wikimania.”

After finding two different sets of buses, neither the ones I’m looking for, I got to a covered depot with no English destination signs, only Arabic. One person said a bus to Alexandria leaves at 7am, one said 730am, one said ticket was 35 Egyptian pounds (LE) another said it was 10 LE (hard to believe for a four hour bus ride). Buses looked rickety and rusty. Couldn’t find anything for the life of me. Went back to fellow who pointed it out, and said, “I can’t find anything there.” He laughed in annoyance, held out his hand to grab mine, and dragged me to one white shack, among many, that had only an Arabic sign and coach bus photo. Walked to the back, cracked open the door to find some attendant sleeping on a makeshift cot. “Hey, this guy want Alexandrina.” Laconic attendant rises slowly, insists the bus was coming in 5 minutes. “How long it would take to get to the destination?” He said four hours. Ouch. “Doesn’t train take two and a half hours?” I said, optimistically. “Yes, but you have to go to downtown Cairo to take that, by that time might was well take four hour bus.” He has a point. If it’s true.

So I wait, in the hot open air depot with the snarl of rusty diesel buses, all of the commuter type — no air conditioning, open windows, plastic fiberglas chairs. The only “coaches” look worn and aren’t going where I’m going. Twenty minutes later of a “five minute” wait, I knock on the shack again and ask, what about the 5 minutes. He says bus should be there at 730 for the ride. Wait a bit with him, and nothing shows. He said one comes every hour. But I’m not convinced.

I figure it’s all too risky. My time is better spent doing the book edits I owe New York, something I thought I could do later that night in cozy Alexandria in a hotel by the beach. I’m not even sure nightfall is practical on this supposed four hour bus ride. (It might actually be more like 6-8 hours, as my friend who visited Egypt/Alexandria recently said she endured because of traffic and closed roads.)

So instead, I wimped out and opted for a “first world” solution. Remembering the beacon of hope, the Novotel sign out in the distance, I dragged my luggage across the parking lot to the police station, asked for the Novotel airport hotel. Took three tries to find a police guy in white military outfit who spoke enough English to understand what I was talking about. Doing sign language for “sleepytime” (hands clasped together, head cocked left, eyes closed and snoring sound) helped.

Walking across the auto toll lanes that don’t have a crosswalk, I ambled to the airport hotel at 8 am. Realize I’m going to have to pay full rack rate for a room at 116 euros, but that sounded much less painful than hypothetical bus arriving “real soon now” to who knows where arriving hopefully some time before sunset.

Asked the hotel checkin guy, “Is Internet included in the price?”

He chuckled and said, “No no no…” What a dense idiot I am, an Accor business airport hotel *giving* you  Internet?

OK, lay it on me you scam artists. What was the Internet pricing. He looks it up and quotes 147 LE.

That’s around US $27.75 for 24 hours of Internet access.

Yes, for the price of nearly two months of broadband Internet access in China, give me 24 hours in an Accor hotel. Why not. I’ve got no fight left in me. It’s already 20 hours of travel into this endeavour, and I’ve been foiled at every turn to get to Alexandria — no English language help, no clear signage, conflicting reports and waiting at a hot smelly bus depot. (And I haven’t even mentioned the obscenely high price for 3G web surfing while roaming that zapped nearly US $20 from my phone card when accessing just a handful of web sites.)

So I’m tired and defenseless. Am I going to argue? I slap down the Amex. Just throw it all on there. At least they’ll check me in this early in the morning.

I’m in the Novotel lobby awaiting my room. Just ticking the minutes down when the formal Wikimania bus arrives tomorrow to get me to the conference, when I get to see some friendly faces, and don’t have to deal with this whole slog.

I get up to check to see if the room’s ready.

“Not yet. Five minutes, sir.”

The idea is to have the community write about the future of Wikipedia. What are the challenges? Where will it be 1, 5 or 10 years down the line? The product will by licensed as CC-BY-SA, so it can continue to evolve.

One thing that is different than Wikipedia is that you can indeed have an opinion! You can’t predict the future “neutrally” in any meaningful sense of the word, so instead I’ve come up with a CRAFT policy, that is more like a code of “responsible journalism.” It consists of being:

Coherent, Reasoned, Accurate, Fair and Transparent

I hope you’ll agree it’s a good starting point.

We already have a nice buzz of activity, so hope to see you there!

Large sheepdog found in Central Park (新城国际) in Chaoyang district: appears to be a Shetland Sheepdog, found 24 hours ago on Sunday afternoon. Will be turned over to the police in the next day, according to Central Park management, and fate will likely not be good.

Details: Dog was found Sunday afternoon at west gate of Central Park, near The Place (世贸天阶), Global Trade Mansion, the new Eton School branch (伊顿新城国际社区中心) and Shanghdu Soho (SOHO尚都). Identifying characteristic: it was found with a colored collar. Responds to Chinese commands. Pictures follow. If anyone has any idea whose dog it is or can pass along this information please pass along this info.

Contact: Go to the management office at Central Park, or I can be contacted at +86 1365 108 1662

The Beijing authorities have an edict against large dogs, hence the urgency. [1] [2]

UPDATE: “Good news everyone.” The dog has been taken in on a foster basis by a resident until/if the comes and claims it. Thanks to all that spread the word.